


The Rebel You Know

by liquidCitrus



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Canon Compliant, During Canon, Gen, POV Second Person, Post-Games (Hunger Games)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-28
Updated: 2014-10-28
Packaged: 2018-02-23 01:10:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2528465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liquidCitrus/pseuds/liquidCitrus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The Games changed you. The Games changed everyone. You know that.</i>
</p>
<p>Beetee, a character study. Tags will be updated as the story goes on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Rebel You Know

**Author's Note:**

> Because of the fact that Suzanne Collins thinks, like many writers, that tech people are magical wish-granters (ridiculous to anyone who knows Smalltalk from a soldering iron), and because I wanted to explore the mind of the kind of person who would create the bombs that exploded twice, and yet not be vengeful enough to ask for a Capitol Games.
> 
> Not an exploration of Beetee's Games. I've always been more interested in the before and after, anyway.

Father  
\----

He taught you how to read the way the electricity traveled, where the wires had to be to produce the effects you could see - the conductive thread stitched into the lining of the garment twinkling with lights; the hidden layers of printed circuitboards.

He also told you that you could read the charge and the current in the way people acted.

You owe him everything.

 

Mother  
\----

She made you promise to stay alive, whatever it took. She didn't tell you when that promise was supposed to expire.

 

Academy  
\----

Up until your Reaping you were enrolled in the District's top school. Technically, it was open to anyone in the District that tested well enough on an assessment of intelligence and talent they gave to six-year-olds. In practice, however fair the assessment claimed to be, and however accurate it was at predicting how well children would do in the accelerated curriculum, most of the children who ended up in the Academy had parents who had gone to the Academy.

You remembered bantering with your classmates in the dorms about programming, eating seaweed sticks while racing each other to see who could make the best games over the weekend. Spending days trying to figure out what to do with a double integral in the study room. The brainteasers that the RA wrote on the whiteboard on the wall of your dorm on Mondays. You won the prizes for solving them first, little kits that you could put together that made wind-up animals and mechanical clocks, six times in a row before the RA told you to let off and let someone else win for a change. You weren't a Career, after all.

You remembered huddling under your desk with the lights off while people tried to break the windows of the school building, the Peacekeepers marching into line outside to protect the school, to protect the precious children whose minds made possible the very existence of District 3. Then, as now, you looked at them - and yes, they were holding back the people who were doing the rioting, but they were holding back a rising tide. Even the new, pointier steel fence - and the dorm rooms for the upper-level students of the Academy, littered with network cables and snack dishes for all-nighters - didn't decrease the frequency or intensity of the people who gathered outside, shouting about how it wasn't fair. How they hated you, all of you, for existing.

You knew how to fix a blown capacitor or a dead program, but you didn't know how to fix this.

 

Wiress  
\----

On nights when the nightmares are particularly bad, you give in to what you think you might have called weakness, once upon a time, and remember her. The way she was, before, with riddles at breakfast and scrambled eggs for dinner. And the way she was before that, when she welcomed you to the Victor's Village, then visited every day for a month to make sure you were actually eating and then decided moving in would be more practical.

A few months after that, Snow made it clear he wanted you to work on his pet projects. Spying devices. Automated drones. Concealable weaponry. As far as you were concerned at the time, you never wanted to kill someone again, and you knew he'd use the things spilling from your fingers to make another Arena. Perhaps not directly, but certainly indirectly, through letting the Sponsors make money, and through keeping other people quiet. The telephone wires, and the invisible wires, between the Capitol and its industries were obvious, even to your eyes. Even then.

Wiress went to try to talk him out of it. Snow lobotomized her and sent her back. Killing her would have been too easy. Grief, you could get over. This you couldn't. Which he knew. Which was why he did it.

You went to work for Snow's purposes two weeks later. You learned of cameras in the walls and microphones in the ground. You learned where all the major underground cable conduits were, and how to fit one more wire the size of a whisper through them to carry a new protocol, a new communications network. You learned how people used to be able to make wireless networks, and the way the destruction of atmosphere overloaded most of the receivers you could make now with static, courtesy of the sun.

Peacekeepers escorted you to work today, through quiet back alleys. Once they killed someone who was in their way. You recognized the contact prongs on their shock weapons when they slid out of the sheath. They were your design.

 

Seeder  
\----

After the Games - in the winter after the Games - the Victory Tour's necessities herded you onto a train same as the last one; and yet it felt smaller, more claustrophobic, when you noticed the pinhole camera winking away behind the barest of pinpricks in the bedstead, faintly, in the light from down the hall.

And you stood up on stage, in District 11, like you'd always seen on the televisions. But after that, in the few hours before you had to leave for the next District, the oldest Victor in that district took you for a walk. And she told you she knew about Wiress. You were about to turn on her and ask her why she'd taken you out to near the edge of the District just to deliver condolences. But then she went on about the way she still went out to the orchards in the spring, toting water, on two buckets held with a stick over her shoulders. Why? Pollinating. Flowers had pollen, which needed to go from one flower to another in order to become fruit. And some of the trees and bushes would pollinate by themselves with the wind or the bells of their flowers, but many of them wouldn't.

So they sent the kids out into the orchards with paintbrushes, as soon as they could climb, while the adults did planting. It didn't matter if the little hands slipped on some of the trees, between the tiny, Cornucopia-shaped basket with the carefully snipped pollen-glands strapped to the child's left hand and the paintbrush held in the child's right hand, and it didn't matter if that slipping meant some of them fell down and broke, or died. There would always be more flowers, and more children.

In the olden days, it was whispered, this work was done by insects. But there were no insects left save the mosquitoes in the ditches and the worms in the flour and the roaches in the kitchens, these days.

You listened, quietly, and you knew you should've told her about the factories where they sent little children to snap or screw or solder components together until they became the wondrous toys that the Capitol loved to feature (and the children became stunted by lead poisoning). But instead, what came out of your mouth was a desperate stream of words about maybe you could try to figure out a machine that could do the same work as the children do, and how you knew it was possible, and they might even cost less if you streamlined the production process, and -

Seeder put a hand on your shoulder, silencing you. "I appreciate the thought. But the Capitol would never let that happen."

What? Why?

"Because it would make our life easier."

You went back to your room, after, and got out one of your old prize toys, the hummingbird. You caught yourself thinking about how to automate the flapping motion, to make it use batteries.

 

Mags  
\----

She smelled of salt and looked like old leather then, too, the kind you saw in the glass case in Ten's Justice building when you visited there to put the new network in. She didn't talk much, and when she did her speech was strangely lilted, as if she had to remember how to pronounce the words every time she used them. As if her brain was programmed in a different language from everyone else.

You remembered, abruptly, a piece of trivia from your Academy years - about how people used to speak different languages and none of them knew how to talk to each other so that was why they all threw bombs at each other and nearly killed everyone. That was why they called them programming languages. But Mags could speak the language everyone else did, and she could communicate just fine. Maybe if you learned her language, then if you ever met a different kind of people you'd be able to talk to them, so they wouldn't start a war over it. You were pretty sure it wasn't actually that simple, but it couldn't hurt to try and it kept you occupied after your Tribute died.

She jabbered in the control room in that strange language to the other one from District Four, and you picked out words, and rolled them around in your head. Late in the proceedings you finally plucked up the courage to ask her what some of the words meant. Muerto, for example.

She stared at you for a long moment. "Dead."

Wait, what?

"It means dead."

Oh, you said, and looked down at your feet.

"I'm sorry about Wiress," she said. "I heard about her."

Your brain wasn't working fast enough to ask how she heard, or why she brought it up, before she touched your shoulder once with a scarred hand and departed.


End file.
